Save the World State of Development - October 2018

10.22.2018

By The Fortnite Team

Hey Fortnite friends,

Since our last State of Dev we’ve been heads down on learning from our recent updates, working on major changes to prepare for free to play, and continuing to add to Save the World. We released the first part of the Canny Valley quest line, added new enemies and celebrated our first birthday! Let’s get started.

No Free to Play in 2018

We decided to move the free-to-play launch of Save the World out of this year. We’re working on a broad set of features, reworks, and backend system scaling we believe are needed to go free-to-play. Save the World has grown consistently since our launch in July 2017 and Fortnite overall has experienced unprecedented growth. Scaling up for the legions of player heroes who will be joining the fight is key to providing an excellent experience. This applies to all of our players, old and new, so we’re taking the time to get this right.

To thank our founders, both new and old, if you log in and play during the Fortnitemares Event, you’ll receive both Brainiac Jonesy and Skull Ranger Ramirez for free!

For those of you who want to start playing right now, we’ve got you. Starting this week, we’ll be hosting a 50% off sale for the Standard, Deluxe, Super Deluxe and Limited Founder’s packs.

Front End Improvements

The front-end UI should feel more like an integrated and understandable part of the game. Bringing the inventory into the front-end earlier this year was the first step, but the upcoming revamp will push things even further.

We're reorganizing menu options to make them easier to find and converting some old UI tutorial quests to use a new callout system. Additionally, we’re adding polish and character(s) to the menus. At the end of this revamp we want to move more of your Fortnite experience into the game rather than in the front-end. We’ll release an in-depth look at all these incoming changes in the next few weeks, to prepare for the rollout in the next few months.

New Hero System

We're excited to announce a brand new updated Hero System! This system has been redesigned to offer a more flexible approach to customizing your loadout with more options and room for creativity. You’ll have a total of six Hero slots to manage up from the previous three. First choosing a main Hero to command and up to five additional which will determine your perks and traits. We’re looking to expand the variety of loadouts you can create - putting the tools in your hands to make meaningful new decisions. We’ll put together a comprehensive blog to run you through the system, when we finalize all the details.

You’re changing a lot of stuff I’ve upgraded, what happens to my invested mats?
We’re working on an investment refund feature that will activate whenever we make significant changes to schematics, heroes, survivors, defenders or any other items you’ve upgraded. Upon launch it will be an opt-in process, we will flag the item that has been re-balanced and you choose to de-level if you wish. We will NOT automatically de-level your items. For this first version we will be rolling out the “re-balance flag” to only Heroes adjusted by the new system, while we investigate how to grant back other materials in edge case scenarios.

Fortnitemares

The most ghoulish event of the year is back! Old Heroes are returning along with many new faces.

You’ll head to Hexsylvania to revisit last year’s Vlad Moon Rising questline. If you played the event last year you may notice a few changes… and even more Vlad than before. New visitors to Hexsylvania will deliver some spooky world saving, as Ray and company confront history’s evil-est Vlad.